


don't you want to get away

by ilgaksu



Series: rewrite the stars [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Circus, Alternate Universe - Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - The Greatest Showman Fusion, Background Plaxum/Lance, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Cuban Lance (Voltron), F/M, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Slash, Running Away, The Greatest Showman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 23:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13177452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “Do you accept whatever may happen tonight,” the boy asks, “And accept it of your own free will, and no blame to be laid at my door after?”The audience leans in, thrilled by the threat. Lance can sense it, without looking away from the boy’s eyes, can feel it shivering in the gooseflesh rising all along his own skin. The boy’s unwavering look stays on Lance - intent, implacable - until Lance nods the second time.“Then,” the boy says, louder again, voice a strike in the stillness, “We will begin.”In which Lance takes a girl to the circus, and loses himself instead. Inspired byThe Greatest Showman, but doesn't require knowledge of the film (and is spoiler free).





	don't you want to get away

March, **1885.**   _Near the_ _French-Spanish border._

 

Lance loses half of himself to the circus the first time he steps inside.

Of course, a good quarter had been gone already, ever since yesterday morning. He’d been out in the town square, escorting Plaxum. The crook of her arm was curled around his like the closing of a parentheses, something determined perfect by the definitions of science and propriety. They’d come across the group of performers in the street, sent ahead as advertisement. Their silhouettes were strange, beyond that of them being foreigners - this was a border town, so there were plenty moving through, but no one who looked like Lance had ever lived here but for his own family. Yet for once, he was almost invisible in comparison, the newcomers conspicuous against the churned-cream colour of the buildings, costumed like peacocks as they were - creatures let loose in nothing but the feathers God had given them and still somehow extravagant. When a dark-haired boy in a red brocade vest held out a leaflet, stuck it right under his nose, Lance had taken it on instinct, wanting to be polite. He felt the paper stick to the sweat on his palm, the quality of it thin and shivering like onion-skin or a Bible page. He’d told himself it was residual nerves, the sweat, Plaxum being right there in her best dress. It was the one that set off her skin to something glowing, something dusted with moonlight, the one she’d worn the first time Lance had seen her. He told himself it had nothing to do with how he was hooked on the spot by the slow blink of the boy’s eyes - the demand in them, the way he stood like a prince, even out in the March cold dressed as he was. Plaxum shifted, taking in the cutaway of the boy’s shirt, the vest gaping and gold-braided, and the sleeve of her dress brushed against the serge of Lance’s jacket. It went through him as though skin to skin anyway.

“Aren’t you awfully cold?” she asked the boy. Lance could imagine the narrow of her eyes, dark like a magpie’s, and the gathering together of her eyebrows - could imagine it without even looking, had imagined her often enough, but he didn’t look. The boy didn’t reply, less bearing the scrutiny patiently so much as shrugging it off like an ill-fitting coat.

“Circus is coming by tomorrow,” he said instead, his French the careful lilt of a foreigner trying to wrap his tongue around the unfamiliar. Lance glanced down, getting a glimpse of his own face in the high polish of the boy’s riding boots, upturned and waxy, as though viewed in the silver bowl of a spoon. The boy turned and moved on before he could look back up.

When Lance lifted his eyes to Plaxum’s, she was looking at him with a curious expression. It was one he’d seen on her face once or twice, and it sent something unsettled through him every time. He smiled, and leaned in, mouth to her ear and said, “I’ll take you if you like,” and she’d laughed, the sound carrying so those nearby looked their way. That laugh smoothed the crease of her face out, which was Lance’s particular victory for the morning. Things all settled, he’d then made the mistake of mentioning it to his mother in earshot of the others, so they’d all clamoured to go too. A hoard of siblings was hardly what he’d planned. But his mother, who had been dropping hints about marriage for the last year at least, was pleased enough that Lance was seeing Plaxum again that she had the mercy to make sure they were seated some distance away.

The thing that strikes Lance at first, now that they’re here, is the sheer light of it all. Braziers, bright-eyed and burning and driven into the ground, lead the way to the tent - which was a very small word for this palace of striped canvas. The audience themselves are providing their own kind of furnace, separate to the torches casting shadow games on the sides of tent. All the people Lance has known all his life are transformed into chiaroscuro on the walls as they take their seats along the benches. There’s the crunch and smell of fresh straw underfoot as though in a newly cleaned stables, the scent of burnt sugar from the vendors selling things caramelised and candied. Lance helps Plaxum to their seats, then stands to go get her some oranges, something he knows she likes. It’s a safe bet, which seems silly in a place where the air tastes like risk, but there it is. When he returns, an orange in each hand, he stands a little distance away at first, watching Plaxum watch it all. The sawdust ring at the heart of the tent, the ventricles of dust leading out and between the benches, the excited chatter like a rising wave. The torches keep on like their own miniature suns, picking up the sweat on skin and turning it to something glittering. The firelight changes her face, shapes hollows into the soft apples of her cheeks, sets her eyes a little wild and strange. For a moment, Lance has a sense of what she might look like when she is old, or angry, both things he has naturally never seen. It strikes in him then, the thought that she has her own interior world too, something kept banked, something he glimpses on occasion, piecemeal, when it’s judged by her to be -

A safe bet.  

But then she blinks up at him, and smiles, and the thought’s gone. Because her smile is easy to fall into, something that is safe, her mouth distracting without being a danger. It’s not about being torn. It’s never been about that. It’s about how half of what Lance wants doesn’t make a whole. It’s about there being a life that has been built for him, by his parents, a whole world spun by them out of their hopes, and how to turn his back on a gift like that is plain ungrateful.

Can you be homesick for somewhere you’ve never lived? Unlikely. Surely, then, it has to be the same for lives you’ll never have.

The show starts. Lance means to watch Plaxum some more, to revel in the sheer opportunity to be at such close quarters for so long, unmarried in a crowd but somehow unsupervised - but he can’t. There’s just so much else to see. It’s a miniature universe, unfolding at Lance’s feet, a constant parade of colour and sound. Plaxum seems similarly entranced. She does spare a snort for how, when the ringmaster storms out, whip in hand - a _woman_ \- in a leotard cut to show all of her legs, Lance’s jaw just about hits the floor, and it’s not over the way her hair is albino white, or how there’s markings on her skin like tracery of lightning in a sky, it’s just - it’s rather more the skin in general, which he can see a lot of and -

He shuts his mouth again, guiltily glancing Plaxum’s way, but she’s amused, already turning back to the display, shaking her head at him and laughing. He tells himself he’ll keep his eyes on the ringmaster - ringmistress? - and her face after that, but it’s not - it’s just -

He’s never seen a woman’s legs before, not so much of them. And definitely never a woman who was a stranger to him.  

At the interval, they spill out of the tent in a throng like Noah’s flood, hand-in-hand like animals fresh off the Ark. Plaxum is acting like she’s forgotten to replace her glove, and maybe she has. Lance’s heart beats in his palm. She pulls him along, through the sideshows, chattering about the escape artist that had closed the first act. Lance slows down a little as they pass a stall with shooting rifles and ribbons for prizes, glancing at Plaxum, but she barely notices.

“And how he made it out of those chains, one arm missing as it was - and underwater!”

“I’ve never seen anything like him,” Lance tells her honestly. Abruptly, she pulls him forward, a bit sharper this time, so he stumbles into the circle of her skirts, ungloved hand a scandal at her waist. He can feel how the whalebone of the corset beneath his hold undulates with each of her breaths. Plaxum tips her face up, the half-moon of her mouth not fully eclipsed by the shadow of her bonnet. They’re in the gap between stalls, and even though they can hear voices, they somehow seem at a distance.

“Thank you,” Plaxum says, “For asking me here how you have,” and kisses him. It’s a brief thing, like a punctuation mark even as it’s anything but perfunctory, brushing along the line of his cheek like a moth’s wing, but he feels the heat rise under his skin all the same - a surprise, like a pot coming to the boil the very moment you look away from it.  

“You’re sweet,” Plaxum says, laughing again, and it sounds like she means it. Lance swallows hard. Then they hear the bell clanging, announcing the second act’s imminent start, so he’s saved from having to come up with something. He’s not sure he could have if he’d tried.

 

*

 

The second act opens with a promise of knife-throwing. When the boy from the town square steps into the ring, alone and slight and serious, Lance almost swallows his own tongue. As it is, the orange slice Plaxum had offered him is crushed in his mouth: the flood of sweetness slicks the inside of his teeth as the boy - dark-eyed and unsmiling, a belt of knives heavy with metal around his hips - turns to face the audience and gives a short bow. Lance misses his name.

“Thank you for your attention,” he says, and begins. His hands become a blur of silver, and it takes Lance a beat to realise he’s juggling, throwing the blades up in the air and snatching them back out, unharmed all the while. Lance is clapping before he knows it.

He stays, gaze hooked back on the boy, as the boy takes hold of a trapeze - a leftover from another act, Lance had thought - and hoists himself up and upside down, as easy as Lance gets into the saddle. He throws knives like that for a while, each of them landing safely on their mark - a large circular target board directly opposite to the trapeze. Then, the boy takes a silk kerchief out, shows it to the crowd - a flare of red spilling from his hand like a threat of what might follow - and then ties it around his eyes. The escape artist from an earlier act waves a torch back and forth in front of the boy - proof he truly is made blind.

“Oh,” Plaxum murmurs, more an exhalation than a proper word, as the escape artist gives the trapeze a tug forward, as momentum and the weight of the boy combined does the rest. Then, soft, “This cannot be safe.”

Lance, watching the boy’s arm reach out, knife in hand, can’t help but think the same. He looks around the crowd, anxious to check his family are nowhere near the target board - he hears a thunk, applause rises to a roar where there had been silence, and Lance turns back in time to see two more knives deposited neatly into the board, on their marks. By the tenth, the anticipation has risen to fever pitch: there’s a palpable sense of disappointment when the boy takes the blindfold off and slips down off the trapeze. And yet, the act isn’t over: there has to be something greater for a finale, Lance is sure, only not sure what.

“I need a volunteer,” the boy says. Lance ought to stop thinking of him as such - he looks close to Lance’s age, and as Lance’s mother keeps reminding him, that’s past marrying age in this town. His French is still as slow and measured, even as his eyes skip quickly across the crowd. Lance feels something in his gut drop when they settle on him, briefly, but they move on with no recognition. They settle on Plaxum, something in the boy’s gaze hardens, surer, and Lance has barely a moment to realise what is going on before the boy is before them, close, reaching over the ring. His hand is outstretched in Plaxum’s direction, covered in a kind of glove but somehow still bare, cut to free his fingers and a swathe around his thumb.

“May I borrow you?” he asks her and not Lance, calm, as though Plaxum isn’t shrinking back into the folds of her dress like a child. Plaxum looks to Lance, wide-eyed. Lance shrugs, which he hopes is encouraging enough, but Plaxum looks about, the weight of everyone’s combined stares leaving her speechless. Eventually, she clears her throat, a small thing, and says, “No, thank you, sir. If it’s all the same, I’d rather not.”

Lance looks at her, aghast. How can Plaxum be brave enough to take a kiss, but afraid of a man - a stranger, for sure - but in front of her whole town? After being chosen, how she had? Lance had seen him choose her.

“Don’t be scared,” Lance says, and she keeps her eyes downcast, sliding away from him.  

“Easy for you to say.”

The boy is still stood there, it’s barely been a span of seconds, but Lance presses, going, “I’ll be right here, if you’d like to.”

“I wouldn’t like to.” Plaxum’s voice is firmer now. She turns back to the boy and shakes her head. He nods, drawing back. His eyes are moving between them, something flashing through them too fast for Lance to catch up to. Then he moves to stand in front of Lance, and holds out his hand again.

The world seems to go still.

“You can’t be serious,” Lance hears himself saying. The boy blinks at him, slow and steady.

“Don’t be scared,” the boy says.

It should sound reassuring, how Lance had been with Plaxum, but the smirk on his mouth tells another story. It says _I knew you didn’t have it in you, even with all that talk._

And Lance has always had a weakness for bets: for giving in to them, that is. It’s a habit born of days where he had twice as much to prove in the schoolyard to the other boys. Where, with his family from far-flung Cuba and his skin never paling to the same as the others in his classroom, he’d known backing down from their challenges was a sure way to make sure he’d never belong. So he’d carved out a space, knocked out teeth and climbed trees and done everything asked of him and more, and in the end, it had been enough. He had settled his debts, and now some stranger, a foreigner in Lance’s town, had picked him out and torn that wide open again.

So Lance has no choice to take his hand, let himself be hauled out of his seat. His shoes sink a little into the sawdust as he steps into the ring, and he can feel the audience’s surprise - it is, after all, an echo of his own.

“What is your name?” the boy asks. He’s throwing his voice wide, flinging it up to the rafters, making it a sound to be heard even by those in the back, so Lance makes to match him.

“Lance.”

“Nice to meet you, Lance,” the boy says, even shakes his hand, something which gets a quick laugh. “And - because I know you’ll have heard of the kind of places that like to play tricks on the audience -  have we ever met before tonight, Lance?”  

“No,” Lance says automatically, sticking to the script, before going, “Wait, actually. Yes. Yes, we have.”

The boy, already moving on to the next portion of his spiel, stops, frowns at him, and comes back, reeled in by the reply.

“We haven’t,” he says, mouth closing down around the words. He’s displeased, but Lance can’t say he’s not the same. He can’t believe the boy didn’t remember, even though it was fleeting. If someone had commented on Lance’s manner of dress the way Plaxum had, it would’ve stuck with him.

The crowd murmurs, confusion rustling through them.

“We have,” Lance insists, “The other morning. You gave me a leaflet.”

The boy blinks at him.

“Yes,” he echoes, uncertain, piqued. “Yes. You’re right. I did.” He turns to the audience, and raises his voice once more. “Would you prefer I pick someone else?”

He’s asking them, Lance realises, about the same time he realises how very much he _doesn’t_ want someone else to be picked. To be a second choice and then put back -

“Nah,” someone yells from the back. “Keep him. He’s my brother, though, so I’d rather he wasn’t coming back full of holes.”

The explosion of laughter reaches Lance’s ears almost as an afterthought. He can see where Rafael, twelve years old and with the pride of twenty, is stood up on the bench, hands cupped around his mouth to be better heard. Next to him, still sat, are his sisters, laughing behind their hands, and his mother, mouth twisted, as though unsure whether to fret or not.

He feels the boy startle next to him, then relax. When Lance turns, the boy is smiling at Rafael. It’s the first time he’s smiled all act, broken open and out of his mask of concentration. It does something to Lance’s blood, something inflammatory and frightening.

“You will have him back,” the boy promises, and when he speaks again, it’s to Lance. The swift quiet isn’t Lance’s own cotton-headedness, but a hush of silence falling over the crowd - smothering, separating. Lance feels as though a pane of glass now exists between him and all his hometown, and he’s left here, on the other side, with the dark-eyed boy. Alone in front of all his own people.

“Do you accept whatever may happen tonight,” the boy asks, “And accept it of your own free will, and no blame to be laid at my door after?”

The word Lance is thinking of is _helpless._ He nods. This close, he can see the greasepaint and how it lies on the boy’s skin, the way it streaks around his jaw, the way sweat lies on top of it, licking at his skin. How the spots of colour, high against the bones of his face, are made of paint like for a girl. How the hollow and shape of his eyes are made more with long unfurling tongues of kohl.

“No matter what happens?”

The audience leans in, thrilled by the threat. Lance can sense it, without looking away from the boy’s eyes, can feel it shivering in the gooseflesh rising all along his own skin. If there’s a quarter of him left before that moment, it’s lost now. He’s all given over to the circus, to this single moment. The boy’s unwavering look stays on Lance - intent, implacable - until Lance nods the second time.

“Then,” the boy says, louder again, voice a strike in the stillness, “We will begin.”

 

*

 

It’s four in the morning the morning after that, and Plaxum catches Lance out as he crosses through the fields on the outskirts of town. Or rather, she sees him at a distance, already up and about herself, a baker’s daughter down to her bones. Lance recognises the dark rose of her second-best dress, a blossoming against the early grey of the sky. The powdery colour of it is reminiscent of the talc that she uses - not that Lance has ever commented on it, or even asked. It’s just that the smell of it lingers on her skin, and it’s something Lance has breathed in every time she leans towards him, and it’s something part of him yearns for once again. A safe bet.  

The tilt of her head is a question. Lance waves, internally cursing, and she waves back, and heads away down to the town. Her step is confident. She knows the path. She has taken it every morning since she was a child, and will take it every morning after today, and if Lance turned back now, she would be there. A constant, a certainty, smiling, perhaps a little bemused: _whatever had you out of bed so early, Lance?_

Or perhaps not. Lance thinks of the cast of her face in firelight, ringside, the gentle clasp of the shadows, the expression that spoke of small and private rooms within her. She might not be there, not for him, not even if he went back now, but Lance doesn’t plan to find out. He hopes she didn’t spot the satchel he’s carrying, or how it’s brimming with clothes, money and necessities - all the things he needs for living. He hopes she will think their sighting of each other a curiosity, and nothing more. By the time it seems significant, Lance already plans to be gone.

It’s a fool’s errand, he tells himself, what he’s doing here. He’s been telling himself this ever since he stepped out of the circus last night, and felt the tug in his chest: the feeling he’d left something important there. And still, here he is, retreading the steps he’d taken last night, relying on circus folks rising late. Hoping to slip through the cracks and find himself on the other side of the canvas again. Trying to catch up to something he can’t put a name to.

It’s a phantom pain of sorts, low and keening and insistent, and it started somewhere between the boy leaning over him, buckling his right wrist to the target board, and Lance closing his eyes against the closeness of the boy’s face to his own. A pain that curdled like too much sugar, sticky in his mouth, when the boy had said, voice low and pitched perfectly against Lance’s ear, and for Lance alone: “Do you trust me?”

His own reply, falling out of his mouth and between them like a challenge: “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Try me and find out.”

Lance didn’t dare open his eyes. He felt the faint heat of the boy’s laugh against his throat, there and then gone again.  

It’s nothing to pin a life to. A nameless boy, longing like a sickness, and that same old feeling. That he could take the life laid out for him here and call it contentedness, but that it would always be like wearing a skin too small for him. And then, this too: that however convincing he could be, however long he could curl himself inside of the constraints to fit, the seams would wear through one day.

It’s nothing to pin a life to.

Lance hoists his satchel back onto his shoulder, raises his head towards the approaching dawn, and doesn’t _dare_ look back.

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when watching _The Greatest Showman_ reignites a long-dead Victorian-era travelling circus AU. I would say I'm sorry, but I'm not. I'm having too much fun.
> 
> I looked for multiple real-life places for Lance's hometown, but ultimately came up short, hence the vagueness. If anyone knows of a village nearby to Castelnaudary, my current favourite location, and whether there was a railway system in place to cross the French-Spanish border by 1885, I'd love to know. 
> 
> Also, I hope people spotted Allura and Shiro. The others will follow in a tentatively planned sequel - that is, if I ever keep up this momentum, get through my other writing obligations, and if?? The stars align exactly right?? 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
